Yes, It Was The 'Affordable' Care Act That Increased Premiums

While the debate proceeds over some details of the American Health Care Act, it’s worth pausing to take another look at how awfully misnamed the so-called “Affordable” Care Act has turned out to be, especially for people who buy their health plans on their own, rather than obtain it through an employer. While advocates and politicians have cited numerous examples of people facing huge premium increases, ACA advocates have been able to respond that those are cherry-picked cases, or that premiums were increasing before the ACA and would have increased anyway.

Those responses are no longer plausible. It turns out that across the board, for all ages and family sizes, for HMO, PPO, and POS plans, premium increases averaged about 60 percent from 2013, the last year before ACA reforms took effect, to 2017. In same length of time preceding that, all groups experienced premium increases of less than 10 percent, and most age groups actually experienced premium decreases, on average.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2017/03/22/yes-it-was-the-affordable-care-act-that-increased-premiums/